Today we visited with two very important institutional
ministries of the Diocese of Jerusalem.
The first visit was to the Princess Basma Hospital for Disabled Children
where we had a tour of the entire facility, which is impressive to say the
least. This hospital was founded in 1965
to care for children paralyzed by polio and it later grew into a significant
and stellar hospital for children with various disabilities serving the West
Bank and East Jerusalem. The hospital
has dormitories where some of the children stay with their mothers during their
treatment. There is also a school on
the site where the disabled children are educated in classes with children who
are not disabled. The hospital now
serves many children with cerebral palsy, autism and children who are
deaf. Because of the extreme difficulty
Palestinians in the West Bank face when trying to find treatment for their
disabled children the hospital has outreach teams that go out to various towns
and villages in the West Bank to do initial assessments on children there and
when they determine that a child needs the level of care that the hospital can
provide, they work with the family to secure the permits needed for the child
and mother to come to Jerusalem for the treatment. Our hostess who is the director of the
hospital was loath to complain about the difficulties they face daily, but when
questioned, admitted that they face constant challenges due to the Israeli controls
of the checkpoints between the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the difficulty
they often have getting permits for the children to come to East
Jerusalem. Sometimes the Israelis issue
a permit for the child but not the mother, and then they have to try to find
another female relative who might be able to come with the child. They obviously prefer that it be the mother
because part of what they do is train the mothers to administer the various
therapies to their children so that when they go back to the West Bank the
mother can help the child continue to progress.
The Israelis also are inclined to close the checkpoints arbitrarily
which means that employees of the hospital who live in the West Bank can’t get
to work and any patients who were scheduled for that day then have to be
rescheduled and their permits renegotiated.
Yet again, we were confronted with the daily struggles the Palestinians
face just trying to live their lives under Israeli occupation. This hospital is another example of Christian
Muslim cooperation – it’s a hospital run and sponsored by the Anglican diocese
and yet many of the employees and patients are Muslim. The dedication and determination of the
employees of the hospital to serve the disabled children of Palestine was truly
amazing.
After lunch we went over to St. George’s School, an Anglican
school run by the diocese. For
elementary school they serve both boys and girls but the high school is just a
boys school. We had the pleasure of
meeting five young men who are seniors at the school. They told us what it is like to be a young
Palestinian male in Jerusalem and the stories were heartbreaking. Most of them have relatives who have been in
jail at some point or another, and often for no good reason. They report the same kinds of experiences
that young black men in America’s cities face in terms of being targets of
police interrogation and questioning.
These young boys, all of them top notch students (all have been part of
the Model UN Program which is an elite program that takes them to other
countries to participate in the model UN experiences) all of them young men who
are hard workers, who are planning to go to University, who are not trouble
makers, yet all of them have had to deal with constant harassment by the Israeli
police. One boy said he won’t go jogging
because if the Israeli soldiers see him running they assume he’s up to
something and stop him. They said that
they can get in trouble if they post something on Facebook that is
pro-Palestinian or perceived by the Israelis to be anti-Israel. They say that their Facebook pages are
watched by the IDF. One of the boys is a
poet but he said he cannot write or publish any of his poetry because the
Israeli authorities will come after him if he expresses criticism of Israel or
its policies. The boys expressed
frustration at the limitations of their lives as Palestinians under Israeli
occupation, but interestingly, even those who said they plan to go abroad for
University, said they want to return to Palestine after they get their degrees
so that they can help their own people.
The principal and assistant principal spoke of how difficult it is for
them to do the work they need to do at the school because of the Israeli habit
of closing the West Bank with little or no notice, thereby restricting access
and keeping both students and staff from being able to get to school. They then have to adjust their curriculum and
other plans they have just to cope with these arbitrary closures and
disruptions. They also complained about
the Israeli control over the textbooks that they are to use. There are different textbooks for Israeli
public schools and Palestinian schools and, according to the principal, the
Palestinian narrative is completely absent from the textbooks that they are
required to use to teach history and culture.
They wind up having to supplement the textbooks with other materials and
even that is risky because the Israelis don’t want them to be teaching the
Palestinian narrative at all. The
students who want to go to University have to sit for certain exams that they
take at the end of their senior year and which determine whether they will be
admitted to University. The Palestinian
students take the exams that are prepared by the Jordanian government, not Israeli
exams. Of the five boys we spoke to, 4
of them were aiming to go either to a Palestinian university or a university
abroad. One of them was aiming for
Hebrew University in Jerusalem because he wants to do accounting and needs to
get the certifications for that profession from an Israeli institution, which
means he will need to spend a year after high school learning Hebrew so that he
can manage in the Hebrew University classrooms. Those young men were amazingly articulate
and expressed a certain youthful optimism that was quite engaging. A number of them had participated in a youth
exchange where they interacted with Israeli youth and got to know them and vice
versa. I had the impression that much
more of those kinds of experiences are needed here because there is such
complete separation between the Palestinian/Arabs in Israel and the Jewish
Israelis that they really don’t get to know one another at all. The suspicion and prejudice and
discrimination that is a constant fact of life for Palestinians/Arabs in Israel
will never diminish until more Israeli Jews have the opportunity to interact
with Palestinians.
After our meeting with the students, we had some free time,
so two of my fellow pilgrims and I went to the Old City to walk around. We stopped at an Austrian Roman Catholic
Guesthouse which has a lovely coffee shop and then went up to their rooftop
which has a spectacular view of the Old City.
You can see for miles all around Jerusalem from up there. I’ve included some pics of the city as seen
from that rooftop. We then went to the
church of St. Alexander Nevsky, a Russian Orthodox Church right next to the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher. This
Russian Orthodox church is stunning inside and it sits on top of some
significant ruins of the first century Jerusalem. The famous “eye of the needle” that Jesus
refers to in the gospels (the one a camel can’t pass through!) is there as is a
structure that is known as the Threshold of Judgment Gate, believed to be the
edge of the city walls in the time of Jesus.
We were able to walk through the needle’s eye, and then we soaked in the
beauty of the icons and oil paintings of the church itself. I’ve included pics from the church too.
After Evening Prayer we were hosted by the local cathedral
congregation for a delicious Arab supper and the chance to talk with some of
their elderly congregants. One of them
is quite famous, having been the director of the Princess Basma hospital for
over 30 years. Her name is Betty Majaj
and she has written a book about her life experiences. She is a fount of stories and information,
having lived here before 1948 and remembering the War of Independence/Nakba and
having continued to live here ever since.
She had nothing good to say about the Israeli authorities and even less
good to say about American foreign policy that supports the Israeli government. She was a fascinating person to meet and talk
with as she has lived through so much in her 90 years. And she is completely with it and sharp! She’ll probably make it to 100! Yet again, however, we were reminded of how
bitterly the Palestinians resent the loss of their land, their homes, their
rights and how they are chafing under the Israeli occupation.
The fifth picture down is the famous "eye of the needle!"
Tomorrow we are supposed to go into the West Bank, but there
have been some unexpected closures of the West Bank this week by the IDF so we
won’t know till the morning whether we can actually go or not! Such is life in occupied Palestine.
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